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1. New Google patent: how to judge the value of a link

Google has been granted a new patent with the name "Determining quality of linked documents" some days ago. The patent might give us further insight on how Google judges the influence of a link on the search engine positions of a web page.

What is the patent about?

Here's the official abstract:

"A ranking component ranks documents, such as web pages or web sites, to obtain a ranking score that defines a quality judgment of the document. The ranking score of a particular document is based on the ranking score of the documents which link to it and based on affiliation among the documents."

According to the patent description, Google could rank the backlinks to a web page differently based on the relation of the pages to each other.

For example, links from pages that have the same author might have less influence on the rankings of a web page that have no affiliation with the linked site.

The patent also contains an image that illustrated how the related of web pages might be:

How does Google limit the value of a link?

According to the patent, Google might do the following:

Google assigns a maximum value to links that come from affiliated pages.

The quality of the links is more important than the quantity of the links.

If you haven't done it yet, download our SEO software tool IBP now and optimize the links to your website as well as the content of your pages. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer is based on Google's latest ranking algorithm and it tells you what is needed to get high rankings on Google with the current algorithm.

"Using the robots meta tag with 'noindex' ('follow' is implied, so you don't have to specify it separately) is a fairly good solution. [...]

At any rate, I would definitely not recommend using the robots.txt to disallow crawling of those print pages since that would make it impossible for us to see the meta-tag and to recognize that the content is the same as in the article pages. [...]

It probably makes sense to prevent a print-version from being indexed (as it is now), but past that I don't think it's necessary to tweak it further with a rel=canonical. It might however make sense to place the rel=canonical on the individual pages (pointing to the preferred URL for that particular page) to prevent duplicate content such as that found in the last search."

"Just want to add a word of warning here -- using automated translation tools to directly create content for your site could be seen as creating auto-generated content, which would be against our Webmaster Guidelines.

Instead of just taking the output of a program like Google Translate, I'd strongly recommend at least having it corrected before putting it online. While Googlebot may initially fall for some Spanish keywords in your text, your users are not going to appreciate content that has been automatically translated and published without a review."

"Without a bit of advertising, sales of gift baskets had grown 400 percent. [...] Then, one day, he woke up to find that Google, the source of 80 percent of the company's revenue, had banished his site from its search results. [...]

This was right before the holiday season, when we typically make 40 to 60 percent of our annual revenue. It was really, really devastating."

"We spotted Mayday a few days before it became widespread. I am seeing the same type of update happening again on our largest property. Another large scale whack to longtail is in the works this week. [...]

For one of our sites with millions of pages we been effected largely and in fact a lot of spam sites have taken over the 1st position. And backlink analysis show pure comment spam. I hope its just some dance because of some links that we built."

"EcoMowers has only 5% of this market, and primarily generates traffic through PPC and SEO channels. In fact, he gets 50% SEO traffic through organic search, and 50% through paid search.

Now, given that the Web's traffic is 85-90% organic search, it is clear to me that Andy has not yet leveraged SEO to its fullest potential, and doing so would give him the biggest bang for the buck at this point. To get from 5% market share to 20% market share in his market Andy clearly has a low-hanging fruit in front of him."

We especially like the easy way we can track search engine rankings and see the effect of page changes.

The suggestions that IBP makes for improving rankings have also helped us. We recommend IBP for anyone who wants to understand SEO and wants to stop wasting money by having someone else do their SEO for them."Gary, www.freebears.com

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